Overview

Leela Prasad's primary interests are in the anthropology of ethics, colonial-era anthropology in South Asia, prison pedagogy and Gandhi, and religion & modernity. Her work examines the lived, expressive dimensions of ethics in Hindu and other Indic contexts through various lenses such as narrative, art and ritual, and everyday practice. She puts these findings in conversation with wider debates in ethics on normativity, subjectivity, aesthetics, temporality and the public, for instance. Her ethnographic book Poetics of Conduct: Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town (Columbia University Press, 2007) explores how ethical discourses and self-formation can be understood through a study of oral narrative, performance, vernacular material practices ranging from architecture to foodways, and the poetics of everyday language. (This book was awarded the “Best First Book in the History of Religions Prize” by the American Academy of Religion in 2007.)

Leela’s second monograph titled The Audacious Raconteur: Storytelling and Sovereignty in Colonial India, builds an archive from the unofficial anthropology and literary writings of three little-known Indian scholars in late colonial India, and from the recorded oral narrations of a Goan Christian ayah. Through a close study of these narrators, who constitute the figure of the “audacious raconteur,” the book argues that audacious raconteurs wrested back concepts of religion, culture and history through experiential understandings of those concepts—and accomplished this re-appropriation using the very language, genres, and Enlightenment paradigms of the West. As such, the audacious raconteur was a political subject whose sovereignty in the realm of creativity displays the unreachability of the colonial knowledge-project. The book benefited from a surprising turn with the discovery of descendants of the writers. Conversations with families help us see why the audacious raconteur continues to be an ethical figure necessary in modern life.

A key area of Leela's interest is documentary film. She is currently co-directing an ethnographic documentary film called Aftertones: Moved by Gandhi, a filmthat explores the poetry of ethical resonance. Leela's next book project has emerged from this film, and from her experience teaching semester-long courses on Gandhi in the state and federal prison systems in North Carolina. This new ethnographic project, called Being Human at the Margin hopes to understand how ex-prisoners who have been exposed to Gandhi’s writings during their prison terms (in the western Indian state of Maharastra) re-figure Gandhian influences in their post-prison lives. She has been awarded a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Fellowship for this research project.

She has published in journals such as Numen, Journal of Religious Ethics, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Oral Tradition, Journal of South Asian History and Culture, and in various edited volumes.

Leela is fluent in the Indian languages of Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, and Hindi. She was the inaugural faculty director for the Duke Center for Civic Engagement, and has served on the Board of the Center for Documentary Studies for many years, the steering committee of the university-wide Mellon-funded transformative humanities initiative at Duke called Humanities Writ Large, the Executive Committee of the Graduate Faculty, and on the American Academy of Religion's Board of Directors.

Selected Grants

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